The Mercenaries
by Sparky Young Upstart
Summary: The rogue agent Taskmaster, capable of mimicking any act he sees, breaks into a S.H.I.E.L.D. storage facility for Centipede. The only person who can shed light on why is a mercenary named Wade Wilson - Taskmaster's old partner. But Coulson's team may not be able to handle this merc's mouth as they team up to find the stolen items and stop the next phase of Centipede's plan.


So many office buildings around the world look similar to each other. Glass sides covering every inch save for the metal rods holding everything together, a pavilion that inevitably contains columns cutting diagonally into the building's base, a lobby with a grand design on the floor of the foyer, and maybe a sloping design or two at the top of the building - even with the tiniest changes it's hard to tell each one apart from the outside. From the inside, however, one could imagine any number of things - row upon row of office workers, a collection of labs experimenting with technology and biology, a giant brothel even. Only those that can get inside them really know what these buildings could contain.

A man sat in the corner of the foyer of one of these very buildings, located in downtown Cincinnati. People dressed in suits regularly came and went, punching a code into the elevator control panel before the doors opened. He was clad in a white, rain-soaked hoodie with the hood draped over his head and a tablet computer in front of his face, obscuring his features. His eyes gazed at the video he was watching, and faint sounds of fighting could be heard from his headphones. Nobody could see what he was watching, but in fact it was footage of Captain America from back in the war days. Not those silly, cheesy movies he made before he was shipped off, but the real footage taken from his tours with the Howling Commandos.

Every once in a while his eyes flickered up to observe the area. He glanced at the clock, the elevator panel, the secretaries at the desk, the guards standing at attention, the decorative shield on the wall, and back to his tablet. Nobody paid him any mind - they all assumed he was simply taking shelter from the rain. He had only been there ten minutes or so. A bus schedule was laying on the bench beside him - if anybody asked, he was waiting for the next one to stop outside. Five minutes later he did it again - clock, panel, desk, guards, shield. Waiting for the hands to read the time he was given.

The clock struck five in the afternoon. The man put away his tablet and headphones, placing them within his hoodie. Then he stood up and calmly walked towards the shield on the wall. It wasn't rounded like Rogers' was, which was a shame, but most of the techniques used by the good Captain could be down with a standard pentagonal one like the one he was looking at.

The man reached up and grabbed it, pulling it off of the wall. Immediately the guards pulled their weapons and pointed them at him. "Sir, put the shield back on the wall!" one of them shouted forcefully. The man turned back around and the guards faltered. He had no face at all - it was just a skull.

"I'm afraid not gentlemen. I need this to break into your warehouse." The man then ran at the guards. They fired, but the skull-faced man executed a move he had scene performed moments ago. The bullets ricocheted off the shield, which was then used to bludgeon one of the guards. Then it was thrown at the other one, slamming into his face. Both of them were out cold.

The secretaries at the desk had pulled there weapons - after all, it was protocol for every secret S.H.I.E.L.D. storage facility to keep a fully-armed staff at all times. The skull faced man turned and dashed towards them, avoiding the gunfire using rolls and jumps around the foyer. He approached the first woman as she reloaded, and she had just enough time to notice that his face wasn't a skull at all, it was just a mask that looked like a skull, and then his gloved hand slammed into her face and the electric shock put her out of commission for the rest of his task. He took out the others using moves he had learned not from Captain Rogers, but from security videos he had hacked into several weeks before detailing the takedown of Hammer Corp mercenaries by noted S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Black Widow.

With the foyer cleared of hostiles, the man returned to his shield, then went to the panel and punched in the code. He didn't know what it was, but he mimicked the stance of an earlier agent exactly. He had specifically ensured that an agent near his dimensions would pass through at some point, so that the subtle motions of his arm and movement of his body could be copied exactly. The code was accepted and the man entered the secure facility.

Inside he was met with several armed guards. They were not much of a problem to eliminate. Most of them went down easily enough, and the ones that didn't were incapacitated with a few quick thrusts of the blade hidden in the man's hoodie. With them out of the way, he began to peruse the halls of the facility searching for box number NM-98, occasionally taking out a stray scientist or agent along the way. Shortly after he located it - a metal crate wrapped in several layers of red tape, locked down completely and weighing perhaps 20 pounds.

The man lifted it off the shelf and moved to the centre of the warehouse. He unzipped his hoodie and pulled out a collapsable crossbow. "Freeze!" he heard from behind him. The intruder calmly turned and fired an arrow directly into the throat of the agent who had tried to apprehend him.

"No" he replied as the agent dropped to the ground. Then he held his shield above his head, protecting him from the rubble that dropped down seconds later as a bomb went off on the floor above him, leaving a hole in the ceiling large enough for a single person to fit through. The man dropped the shield and pointed the arrow into the hole, firing a cable through the floors of the building and hoisting himself up, leaving behind a short trail of wreckage and some very disconcerting footage.


End file.
